You hear that this newer generation of corn hybrids takes more nitrogen late in the season to get the yields. We’re putting on fewer pounds of fertilizer at preplant, then putting down 100 pounds of urea (46 pounds of nitrogen) with stabilizers about three weeks before tasselling, and we’ve had some good results, some good yields.

It works well for acres under irrigation to get the nitrogen working immediately. On rain-fed corn, if you don’t get rain, the nitrogen won’t work as well.

We tried it on a quarter of our acres, relying on our co-op to get it done in a timely fashion. It certainly does give you a short-term window to get across a lot of acres, but we will definitely apply it to more acres this year.

It’s hard to do side-by-side yield comparisons of all preplant versus split applications. However, the potential environmental and yield benefits that split applications offer make it worth trying.